Travel By Time

I don’t know that loving someone is really worth the pain that it will someday bring. No matter what you do, no matter what you try you will always lose the people you care about. Sometimes it will be a falling out, sometimes it will be a breaking up, and sometimes it will be death. Any way that it happens, if you let your heart be that vulnerable, if you let it open up and accept that moment where your grandpa lifts you up or you spill you heart out to your mom, or that moment when you see him or her and you heart wells up with love and you just know he /she is it.

How is someone supposed to handle that loss? How do you prepare yourself for it?

Don’t think about it. Live in the present it usually your best bet, because otherwise it would drive a girl insane. Know that the boy she kisses will someday disappear. To know the father she hugs will wither into nothingness. To know that even now her grandpa is only a memory. There are people already out of her grasp that she can’t ever reach again. Sure there are the possibility of heaven or the afterlife… but none of that is sure. None of it is secure, at least not for me. I don’t have that faith. It isn’t that I don’t believe in anything, surely there is some higher power, but what I believe in revolves about the power of the self and my power lacks when it comes to avoiding loss.

When you find that cat outside of Borders and he meows and you know, you just know in your heart that this is for you. That he is meant to be yours, to hold, squeeze, cry on, laugh at. I couldn’t avoid falling in love even if I wanted to on that night. I plunged head first into a love so deep I don’t know how I will ever not have my precious cat.

That is what I am talking about though. Is there any choice in the matter? In choice that involves living and breathing and participating in the world of humans, not hidden in a cabin far away from any person. And there of course is the question, does the feeling and those moments of love make up for the fact that someday, sooner or later, your heart…my heart will be broken and filled with a gaping hole of loss.

I barely knew him. I was 10 when he died. As I spun, danced on my tipsy toes, smiled into a crowd, he was off in the woods bleeding and looking up at the sky with dead eyes. Instantly he was gone. I never had a chance. I sat on his knee and he taught me how to catch fish. He showed me how to mow a lawn with a tractor and he laughed as I raced down the gravel driveway going 15 miles an hour on a john deer tractor laughing my 7 year old head off. Those are the only moments I really have of him. I don’t know how I can miss him so so much and yet never have really known him. I had nightmares of the night he died. Of the field and the scream that rips through my throat warning him “Don’t go grandpa. Stay here” Then the gunshot rings out. There have been dreams where he visits me. He walks with me and asks how I am doing. It isn’t a dream it is really him. He holds my hand and tells me how much I have grown. We look in on my grandmother; it hurts him to see my father where he is. It hurts him to know we are broken. And then he hugs me and he has to leave because the sun is coming and I will see him next time. Usually years away. And I wake up and my heart throbs and my arms ache because he is gone and that… that is the only time I ever see him.

I don’t know how I can stand the loss of people. I don’t know how I can stand the loss of those precious to me. I don’t know why I let them in so close in the first place.

Part of me craves to push it away. Part of me thinks I should run. But those people will always be here… they are always in my heart. Even those I thought were mine forever, those who aren’t dead still reside in there even if they are lost. They come in dreams; they come in moments when I just don’t expect it.

As much as it hurts, like now… All I want is to be held and loved so deeply that someone will understand. I want someone to miss me when I am gone, someone who wants to hold me close forever. How can I be so foolish?

I yearn to love fully. I want to be whole. I want to kiss his mouth and be swept off into our future… but there he disappears. There he leaves me alone in a house, graying and cold. Is there anything worth that pain? Is there anyway someone will love me like that.

Live in the present, enjoy what there is here and alive and in your possession you silly foolish soft hearted girl. I look next to me and smile.

Even though I can’t bear the thought of it, I would rather deal with the pain instead of those I love having to feel it for me.